The program was actually mildly successful in a bad way. During testing, some of the bats with incendiary devices attached escaped, resulting in a large part of the base they were being tested at, Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base, burning down.

Recently I came across this tweet by @FakeUnicode. It included a JavaScript snippet which looked pretty harmless but resulted in a hidden message being alerted. I took me a while to understand what's going on so I thought that documenting the steps I took could be interesting to someone.

Paxos is an algorithm which maintains a distributed, consistent log shared by a set of networked computers. Single-Decree Paxos is a slightly simpler algorithm that solves consensus and is used to implement Paxos.

A secret ceremony was underway. Before the company could release the source code of its digital currency and turn the crank on the engine, a series of cryptographic computations needed to be completed and added to the protocol. But for complex reasons, Wilcox had to prevent the calculations from ever being seen. If they were, it could completely compromise the security of the currency he had built.

The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossom time, feeding it through summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and the smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.

WHEN Paul Kagame was 28, he helped topple the government of Uganda. At 36 he overthrew the government of Rwanda. At 39 he ousted the government of Congo (which was then called Zaire). It is hard to think of another leader who has won so many wars, against such repulsive enemies, on such a tight budget. Mr Kagame is perhaps the most successful general alive, and this is only part of his claim to renown. The boy whose first memories included watching his village burn, and who went to school in a r...

I decided to see how practical it would be to mine Bitcoin with pencil and paper. It turns out that the SHA-256 algorithm used for mining is pretty simple and can in fact be done by hand. Not surprisingly, the process is extremely slow compared to hardware mining and is entirely impractical. But performing the algorithm manually is a good way to understand exactly how it works.

Theoretically, GSM has been broken since 2003, but the limitations of hardware at the time meant cell phone calls and texts were secure from the prying ears of digital eavesdroppers and all but the most secret government agencies. Since then, the costs of hardware have gone down, two terabytes of rainbow tables have been published, and all the techniques and knowledge required to listen in on cell phone calls have been available. The only thing missing was the hardware. Now, with a super low-cos...

React has become very popular among developers and there are lots of resources that speak to its technical merits. However, migrating to (or choosing) a new framework ultimately comes down to selling it to everybody at the table — including non-developers.

Maru packs a complete desktop experience on your smartphone. Your phone runs independently of your desktop so you can take a call and work on your big screen at the same time. Personal computing couldn't be simpler.

Interviewer: First of all, we're working in a subdivision building a lot of brown houses. Have you built a lot of brown houses before?
Carpenter: Well, I'm a carpenter, so I build houses, and people pretty much paint them the way they want.

Interviewer: Yes, I understand that, but can you give me an idea of how much experience you have with brown? Roughly.

he RGBM color transform seemed to be a popular way to encode lightmaps. I gave that a try and the results weren't perfect, but it was a clear improvement and I could already think of several ways of improving the encoder. Over time I tested some of these ideas and managed to improve the quality significantly and also reduce the size of the lightmap data. In this post I'll describe some of these ideas and support them with examples showing my results.

In 1701, in Middletown, New Jersey, Moses Butterworth languished in a jail, accused of piracy. Like many young men based in England or her colonies, he had joined a crew that sailed the Indian Ocean intent on plundering ships of the Muslim Mughal Empire. Throughout the 1690s, these pirates marauded vessels laden with gold, jewels, silk, and calico on pilgrimage toward Mecca.

here's an optimization guide, aimed at those who know how to program but maybe don't know how it maps to real ones and zeroes on the bare metal of your CPU. I'll try to weave practical tips about optimizing Rust code with explanations of the reason why it's faster than the alternative, and we'll end with a case study from the Rust standard library.

He defends a homey and unfashionable view of time. It has a built-in arrow. It is fundamental rather than derived from some deeper reality. Change is real, as opposed to an illusion or an artifact of perspective. The laws of physics act within time to generate each moment. Mixing mathematics, physics and philosophy, Maudlin bats away the reasons that scientists and philosophers commonly give for denying this folk wisdom.

decided to set myself one final challenge before I sent my draft to the publishers. I was going to take everything I had learnt about the mathematics of football and apply it to a real-life situation. I was determined to use maths to beat the bookies.

Prepack is a tool that optimizes JavaScript source code: Computations that can be done at compile-time instead of run-time get eliminated. Prepack replaces the global code of a JavaScript bundle with equivalent code that is a simple sequence of assignments. This gets rid of most intermediate computations and object allocations.

The key technique is to reduce each word to a normal form so that two words have the same normal form if and only if they are anagrams of one another. In this case we do this by sorting the letters into alphabetical order, so that both megalodon and moonglade become adeglmnoo.

Robbins, who is thirty-eight and lives in Las Vegas, is a peculiar variety-arts hybrid, known in the trade as a theatrical pickpocket. Among his peers, he is widely considered the best in the world at what he does, which is taking things from people’s jackets, pants, purses, wrists, fingers, and necks, then returning them in amusing and mind-boggling ways. Robbins works smoothly and invisibly, with a diffident charm that belies his talent for larceny.

While cartoonish on the surface this game is highly polished with an elaborate design and complex puzzle structure. This post will focus on the puzzle dependency graph and the way in which the puzzles are integrated into the narrative.

If linear regression was a Toyota Camry, then gradient boosting would be a UH-60 Blackhawk Helicopter. A particular implementation of gradient boosting, XGBoost, is consistently used to win machine learning competitions on Kaggle. Unfortunately many practitioners (including my former self) use it as a black box. It’s also been butchered to death by a host of drive-by data scientists’ blogs. As such, the purpose of this article is to lay the groundwork for classical gradient boosting, intuitively...

Grasp is a command line utility that allows you to search and replace your JavaScript code - but unlike programs such as grep or sed, it searches the structure behind your code (the abstract syntax tree), rather than simply the text you've written

Lutz Prechelt wrote a technical report way back in 1999 that did a more rigorous, mathematical analysis of the variance in the time it takes programmers to complete one task. He finds that the distribution is wickedly skewed to the left, and the difference between the top and kinda-normal programmers is about 2.

The best known, although not the most prevalent, manifestation of Jerusalem syndrome is the phenomenon whereby a person who seems previously balanced and devoid of any signs of psychopathology becomes psychotic after arriving in Jerusalem. The psychosis is characterised by an intense religious theme and typically resolves to full recovery after a few weeks or after being removed from the area.

One of my readers left a comment suggesting that picking an integer in [0,232) at random and dividing it by 232, was equivalent to picking a number at random in [0,1)....That’s certainly “approximately true”, but we are making an error when doing so. How much of an error?